Five categories, and they are not points on one ladder

The large resort

A hundred rooms or more, several restaurants, a spa, a kids’ club, and usually an all-inclusive rate. Most are on the north or north-east.

They are reliable, they are good value, and they handle families extremely well — a pool, a buffet, and somebody to take the children snorkelling. They will also feel like a resort anywhere warm rather than like Zanzibar, which for some people is precisely the point after a fortnight of dawn starts.

Ask: how many restaurants, and is the beach in front of it swimmable at low water.

The small beach hotel

Fifteen to forty rooms, one restaurant, a pool, a stretch of beach, and an owner or manager who is present. This is the island’s strongest category and where most genuinely good weeks are spent.

Small enough to bend — a late breakfast, a table on the beach, a boat arranged in the morning for the afternoon — and large enough to run properly. The good ones have been there a long time and it shows in the staff.

Ask: the room count, and whether all-inclusive means one menu for seven nights.

The Stone Town merchant house

A converted historic building in the old town: carved doors, high ceilings, a rooftop terrace, quirky rooms of wildly differing sizes, and a great many stairs.

It is not a beach stay and does not pretend to be. What it is for is being in Stone Town after dark, when the day visitors have gone and the town belongs to itself again.

Ask: whether there is a lift — usually not — and how many flights of stairs to the room.

The private villa

A whole house with its own staff, a cook and a pool, taken exclusively by one party. Generally four to ten beds.

As everywhere, it prices as a unit, so the per-head cost falls as the party grows and crosses over somewhere around six people. Below that a small beach hotel is the better buy.

Ask: what staff are included, whether the cook shops or you do, and how far it is to anywhere you might want to walk.

The barefoot place

Simple, sandy-floored, often on the south-east, frequently run by people who came for a season and never left. Cold showers in some, no air conditioning in many, and a bar that is the centre of the operation.

It is cheap, it is characterful, and it has the most devoted repeat following on the island. It is also genuinely not for everybody, and a honeymoon booked into one by somebody expecting a resort is an unhappy week.

Ask: honestly, whether you would enjoy it. The good ones describe themselves accurately and are worth believing.

Mixing them across a week

Two or three nights in Stone Town in a merchant house, then four or five at a small beach hotel, is the shape that suits most people and it works on any coast.

A villa for a group, with a couple of nights in town at either end, is the other pattern that reliably works. What does not work is four different properties in seven nights, because each move costs a half day of transfers on roads that are slower than they look.